Nobody likes to have the full plot of a movie spoiled before they’ve even seen it. However, sometimes this can be taken to the extreme. Take the new Paul Greengrass movie, The Uprising, for example. It is two weeks away from its US release and, not only does nobody know the plot, but nobody seems to know what it is even about. Seriously, nobody at all. The film’s distributors just spent yesterday squabbling in public about whether Robin Hood was in it or not.
Here’s what we know so far. Initially, all the trailers and promotional materials made The Uprising look like a film about the Peasants’ Revolt that tore through England in 1381. And this was very exciting, since the revolt was a thrilling moment in history that has been bizarrely underserved by Hollywood over the years. Most excitingly of all, though, it sounded like it fit exactly into Greengrass’s wheelhouse; full of action and realism and political awareness.
But that all changed this week, when the film’s US distributor, Focus Features, announced the film’s full title on social media. What had once simply been The Uprising was now The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood. It added a new synopsis, reading: “Set against the true events of the Uprising that helped inspire the legend of Robin Hood, [Andrew Garfield’s character] forms an army of the people to face the King’s might in a fight for justice.”
Needless to say, this was both confusing and frustrating. Frustrating because it sounded like a historically grounded and socially relevant film would now contain a character best known for once being played by a cartoon fox, and confusing because the stories of Robin Hood were set during the reign of Richard the Lionheart, who died nearly two centuries before the Peasants’ Revolt took place.
Andrew Garfield’s character seemed to be at the centre of the mix-up. Officially credited as “The Ploughman”, we can assume that he has been named after William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, which was written in the years leading up to the revolt. The poem is known for containing the first unambiguous literary reference to Robin Hood. It is also worth pointing out that, in 2022 when the film was first announced, The Uprising was set to be called The Hood.
Realistically, several things might have happened here. The first is that Greengrass took a deeply uncharacteristic swing while making this film, and decided to augment the story of Wat Tyler with a time-traveling Robin Hood, blazing into the future to help the downtrodden people of England in their hour of need. The second is that he’s suggesting the Peasants’ Revolt helped reshape a mythical figure into a symbol of working-class resistance, at which point the distributors figured, “Screw it, let’s just tell everyone that Robin Hood is in it.”
This backfired immediately. Not only because people were exasperated by the thought of yet another Robin Hood movie – not for nothing did this year’s A24 movie The Death of Robin Hood flop hard, recouping less than half of its production budget worldwide – but because the film’s UK distributor is adamant that the film has absolutely nothing to do with the guy at all.
Contacted by Metro yesterday, Entertainment Film Distributors issued a statement reading: “The Uprising is a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, not Robin Hood. The UK marketing campaign does not make any reference to Robin Hood. Marketing materials posted by other countries that may appear in the UK online and on social media referencing Robin Hood are not issued or approved by us.”
What we’re left with is a film that urgently needs to define exactly what it is before it comes out. As things stand, somebody is almost certainly going to feel conned.
If the UK distributor is right, there will be those who hear this week’s new title, rush to the cinema in the hope of watching a Robin Hood film and leave disappointed because they were actually presented with a muddy meditation on class warfare based on a 700-year-old allegorical poem.
But if the US distributor is right, then there will be those who rush to the cinema to watch a historically rigorous reenactment of one of the most important moments in British history and leave disappointed because Garfield turns up in a DeLorean halfway through, winks directly at the camera and then gets off with a busty maiden.
The Uprising might be one of those things. It might be both. For all anyone knows, given the utter ineptitude of its own communications, it could even turn out to be Cloverfield 4 and climax with a scene where the peasants, the aristocrats, Robin Hood, King Arthur and Paddington Bear all team up to defeat a howling kaiju. At this point, who would even care?
